There is very little narrative coherence across Nicol’s work. Characters do not have personalities, settings are undefined with actions undertaken with a routine sense of the banal. This limbo is pared down and precisely staged in an unobtrusive spectrum soft pastel colours.

Duck, 2014, acrylic on perspex, 30 x 40 cm

Nicol injects futility with humour. A rafting party of floating figures bobs past a phallic iceberg on inflatable sausages. Flowers blow bubbles and scarecrows are shot with arrows. Stickmen watch their fellows bleeding, building abominable green snowmen and trading decapitated heads. Pastoral idylls set the ironic scenery, populating by rolling hills and snowy expanses, unchanged by gigantic naked men and shivering breasts.

Ceramics embody shapes and motifs found in the paintings, infringing on the parameters of the painted reality and complementing the surprising contents of their painted counterparts.

Freelance illustration clients include The Financial Times, The World of Interiors, United Airlines, Elephant, Lawrence King Publishing, The Telegraph, Condé Naste, the Royal College of Art, House & Garden, Penguin Books, BBDO Advertising, BBH Advertising and CIMA.